Recent Bring Your Own Code

The goal of BYOC is simple: provide an outlet for you, the enquiring software developer, to sharpen your programming skills on a problem a bit more interesting than the normal, boring stuff. That, and to put your code where you mouth is, so to say.

Your Private Foursome

by Remy Porter
in Bring Your Own Code
on 2017-05-17

Last week, I shared some code that, while imperfect, wasn’t that bad. I then issued a challenge: make it worse. Or better, if you really want. As many comments noted: one case covers only the first iteration of the loop, and one case only covers the last iteration of the loop. You could easily pull those out of the loop, and not need a for-case at all. Others noticed that this pattern looked like odd slices out of an identity matrix.

With that in mind, we got a few numpy, Matlab, or MatrixUtils based solutions generally were the “best” solutions to the problem: generate an identity matrix and take slices out of it. This is reasonable and fine. It makes perfect sense. Let’s see if we can avoid making sense.

A Foursome of Arrays

by Remy Porter
in Bring Your Own Code
on 2017-05-10

So, fun fact about myself: I didn’t know what the For-Case anti-pattern was until relatively recently, when there were a spate of articles condemning it as an anti-pattern. I’m sure I’ve probably used it, at some point, but I never knew it by name. It’s thought of as a textbook antipattern that generally implies a misunderstanding of for loop, case statements, the problem being solved, or some combination of all three. That said, there are certain problems that might be more clear to solve by using the For-Case. Like GOTO, it might be harmful, but its actual evil exceeds its reputation.

John A had a problem, and most unfortunately for him, this problem involved VBA macros embedded in an Excel spreadsheet. He needed to generate four arrays, that fall into this pattern: